Over a month ago now we decided to get rid of our televisions (I wrote about it here), it wasn't a case of "oh well we don't really watch it much anyway" it was more like "argh we watch too much TV, what are we going to do?", so of course being the way we are we took drastic action and decided to cut it out all together.
We had worried how Seth would react when he woke up to find the TVs had disappeared so we devised a fun game to play when he woke up, I made a treasure map that led to clues around the house that eventually led to a new Horrible Histories dvd and I explained that although we didn't have the TVs anymore we could still watch the very occasional thing on the laptop, which seemed to soften the blow. From a boy who used to ask for cartoons all day, he has been fine I was honestly expecting screaming, crying and tantrums but he has reacted fantastically, when he asked why they had gone I explained it was so that we had more time to play and do art activities and now he doesn't mention it at all.
We have seen massive benefits in just over a month, Seths got a longer attention span and spends more time playing and being engaged with each toy and the rest of us have got stuff done that we didn't think we had time for before and spend more time talking as a family.
The only thing I would say is I wish we had done it sooner, we all found it so much easier than expected and love our newly calm, quiet TV free home. If you are thinking about doing it go for it, you will not regret it and if you already have done it what differences did you notice? And if you have children how did you handle it?
I grew up going long periods without a TV and it was awesome. I always had my nose in a book or was devising mad plans! We now have a TV and DVD player but no aerial, so we can limit our viewing to films and complete seasons of things. The best of both worlds.
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